It probably has something to do with the Robot Apocalypse

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Pollen is in the air! And it’s blowing into your nose and mouth and eyes. Pollen is the body’s ultimate fake news that sparks a perennial histamine outrage. Histamine makes your body offended by a season and gives it an excuse to cry about something that doesn’t exist and shouldn’t matter.

In the Middle Ages, the symptoms of histamine were mistaken for possession by the Devil. Back then, the only solution available for an allergy sufferer was to slide their neck below a guillotine for temporary relief from demonic fluid draining from their faces.

But at some point between the Middle Ages and Johnson and Johnson, one man, running from the guillotine demon hunter mobs, began furiously rubbing his eyes to obtain temporary relief, even though he knew it would make it worse, and ran head first into a hollow tree. The tree was filled with bees. The man found his head and mouth covered in honey. And he felt a little better (despite the stings). The honey cured his allergies (for a few minutes)! He was proudly accepted back into his village and allowed to keep his neck*.

This moment in history marks the birthplace of natural immunotherapy allergy treatments. It works** because eating the pollen particles left in the honey obviously desensitize your body to the pollen you experience in the air, thus reducing your histamine response. It just makes sense! Just like how sharing heroine needles can help ward off non-hodgskins lymphoma and scheduling your spring break in Chernobyl might just be the best thing for that thyroid cancer – consuming more of the thing that hurts you just makes sense! Now everyone nod and agree!

Since I keep bees, I have my own honey that contains local pollen. In early April I tried eating my own bees’ honey. “It’s working! Local honey immunotherapy is a thing that works!” I screamed at a flower. As the season progressed, I realized I had judged far too quickly to start yelling to plants about something I didn’t know very much about. Honey with tea, twice a day was not keeping the face faucet monster away.

The honey immunotherapy kind of worked while I was actually consuming the honey. Naturally I filled a human sized hampster water bottle full of honey over my desk at work. My boss was totally on board with my productivity increase. However, work was not supportive of me purchasing a life sized hamster wheel with my AMEX and mounting it to the wall so I could blow off some that extra energy.

This immunotherapy just wasn’t working.

I went to my bees to get some answers.

Upon arrival, I threw a jar of honey at my bee hive, shattering glass and honey everywhere. “This stuff is busted!” I yelled at them.

The bees quickly began sucking up the honey and putting it in storage and worked together to fly the glass pieces to the recycle bin. One bee asked me to explain what all the fuss was about.

“Make the kind of honey that makes my eye lids not hurt and mucus pour out all of my head holes!” I demanded.

The bee answered, “Aren’t you the guy that makes us think that our hive is on fire and rips the roof off of our house every other week? Why would we want to help you?”

“You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me. I’m your dad and you do as I say. Make me immunotherapy honey, now!”

All of the bees started laughing at me with their little bee laughs. “Haha, whatever man! Don’t believe everything you read online!”

The worker jumped on to my veil, laughing and wagging her stinger at me. When she did, a puff of pollen flew at my face and I sneezed. The spray atomized through my veil and soaked the whole hive. The bees got right to work cleaning it up.

“Gross you sick bastard!” she said and flipped me the bird. “I’m going to tell the qu- CHOO!” The little bee made a cute tiny sneeze. Suddenly all of the bees started sneezing in a cacophony of cute bee sneezes.

“AH HA!” I told the bees. “That’s called histamine! And now your little bee bodies think the air is poison too. Now you really need to make some immunotherapy honey if you want to survive!”

After only a few moments of experiencing my allergies, the worker jumped on my mask again and pleaded for me to do something, anything! “Please!” she said with gross snot dripping down her face. “I can’t see where I’m going! My head feels like it’s going to explode and I don’t have enough hands to itch all 5 of my eyes!”

I considered her plea. I thought of the middle ages and building a little bee guillotine to help all of the bees out of their misery. But a hive of little headless bees sounded frightening, so I did the only thing I knew to do how when my antihistamines aren’t working.

I brought back a few bottles of Sudafed and Mucinex and set them in front of the hive. The bees immediately started going into the bottles, but the stupid workers couldn’t figure out how to get out of the bottle and they started drowning. Now I had two problems on my hands!

So, I shoved a yellow sponge down each bottle and decorated the rim with some flower petals. The sponge wicked up the medicine and the bees began feasting on it. Soon their sneezing slowed down and stopped altogether. The bees all fist pumped to me and let out several hearty bee huzzahs!

As an added benefit the bees brought the Sudafed nectar back to their hive and began storing it in their cells, mixing it with nectar and drying it out with their wings. The honey stores began to fill with a golden red color. It looked like I was going to get my all natural immunotherapy honey after all!

* The villager was allowed to keep his neck… until the villager’s latent demon caused a hypoglycemic diabetic shock after consuming vast amounts of honey the following spring.

Last year Frito-Lay started putting their SunChips in a compostable bag. The bag was veryloud. It was so loud that it quickly replaced the vuvuzela as the most annoying sports noise maker when the Yankees passed out SunChips to the first 10000 fans, late last August. Fans sang along to Gary Glitter’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, crinkling their bags as they clapped. “CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE HEY!”

The trend caught on and all sports arenas started passing them out, puffing their chests at their environmental action. Sadly, SunChips were quickly banned when fans started throwing their loud bags out on the the field because they thought composting meant they would disappear once they touched the soil. The bags also caused thousands of injuries, mass hearing loss.

Hockey arenas also tried passing out the SunChips bags, but fans once again failed to understand the process of composting and began discarding their bags on the ice rink en masse in lieu of a proper hat-trick. At the end of each period, the Zamboni simply drove over the skate-shredded SunChips bags and permanently encased them in the ice at the brand new SunChips Arena!

So I bought a couple of bags just like everyone else. If you’re like most people you quickly got tired of everyone in your life yelling at you to SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP BEFORE I HIT YOU PUT THE BAG AWAY AND DON’T EAT THEM AGAIN every time you went for a snack. So you dumped the contents of the bag into multiple Ziploc sandwich bags or a couple of gallon sized Ziplocs. Then you threw the compostable bag into the trash.

But it’s compostable right? So even if it ends up in the landfill it just disappears in a billion little pieces where it is reclaimed and consumed by the Earth as an incredibly loud but “healthy” snack. Or is the bag only suitable for an actual compost bin? In that case, does it actually add any nutritional value to your compost soil? Or is it just a clever way to hide your trash? Doesn’t it still leave something behind whether you left it in a landfill or your backyard? (Composting also creates CO2 and Heat) What is the maximum SunChips bag to vegetation ratio?

04-21-10

So last Spring I dug a shallow hole and discarded my first compostable SunChips bag into my garden. (I love hiding trash in my yard!) I know it’s not a compost heap and doesn’t have the proper moisture/air/heat balance to completely compost, but I figured it would at least start to degrade and probably be gone after a year. I planted vegetables like normal, watered, fertilized, harvested, left some plants to rot, and left the garden over the winter.

And forgot about it.

Today I was digging around my garden and cleaning out the old rotten plant matter. I struck something with the shovel that caused a deafening sound. I thought I had struck thunder itself. Fearing I hit the electric line or God’s sleeping place, I threw the shovel and screamed as I ran behind a tree. Rocking back and forth with my hands over my ears, wimpering “make it stop”, I waited until my hearing returned.

3-21-11

When I regained my equilibrium, I returned to the garden. I had to set up an archeological string grid and lightly brush material off the of the garden with a fine broom until I uncovered the source of the thunder sound. Below the soil the SunChips bag was still there, complete with all of the letters, colors, nutrition information, and as LOUD AS EVER. But, it didn’t even try to compost!

Maybe after a few years it will begin to degrade. The bag said it would take 13 weeks under proper compost. But do you really think it’s going to do that at the landfill? Even if it does “degrade” it’s still going to be there under 25 feet of clay. So unless you run a proper compost heap or worm bin, stop patting yourself on the back as “Captain Green” for buying something that says something you don’t understand. The SunChips bag is pretty much just another piece of garbage, unless you can come up some other practical use:

Strategically placed on the stairs to a sniper’s nest as an alarm

Tied to a lazy dog’s tail so it gets some exercise

Stitched together as a Mylar Solar Sail to divert an asteroid away from Earth’s Orbit